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Top 10 Tips to survive Pecha Kucha

First of all, it is not a dangerous jungle, and it is not the Northpol where you have to go to. It even does not go longer than 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It is just a presentation using 20 slides. And even better, you would not annoy the audience by overrun your time, every slide is there for exactly 20 seconds and then it is gone.

For 20×20 you will need at least six hours of preparation if you have some ideas in mind but no proper slides jet.

Don’t cheat yourself during preparation. You will have just 20 seconds per slide, not more and there is no “just a second I have to finalize my sentence”. And you remember that in a presentation it could happen that you will get nervous and speak slower or even faster. Be aware of that and be honest to yourself. Don’t go to near to the border of 20 seconds per slide. Waiting a couple of seconds before slide change is much better than chasing.

Use fullscreen pictures. It looks good, it gives a good impression.

Fun, fun, fun! Even during 6:40 which a 20×20 needs, you don’t want to botter your audience. So add funny parts where they can smile. It is not an scientific lecture where every detail is important. You would give the audience just a glimpse of an interesting topic. They have to decide for themselves if it is worth to go deeper and make a google search on the topic.

Add slides where you can breath. After a couple of slides in a rapidfire style, it would be nice to cool down and breath. You could do that explicitly and add a slide “Breath! – before meeting David” or even implicitly with a slide where you don’t have to much to say but easily can deflect your audience with a nice picture.

Add keywords that gives you the beat. If you would say five sentence to a slide, add two words of every sentence to the slide and run over them.

Extended: Add animations that gives you the beat. For this time it is a good thing to add animations to a slideshow. I don’t like it otherwise. But here it is very helpful if fifv seconds before you slide disappears, a picture or a word with your last keyword occurs.

As in every presentation. The beginning and the end are important. So practice that two parts in depth. The start is important to bring you in the flow and the end is important to make your talk enclosed.

Practice while standing. It is not the confortable situation where you prepare your talk, try to bring you as near to the final situation as possible.

Practice, practice, practice. You should be able to run trough your talk at least a couple of times to recognize how it feels to give the final talk. Are there points that are missing? Is there something to much and feels like not fitting in. Remove, replace and practice again.

So give 20×20 a try and have fun during preparation and during the talk as well!